LSD Museum or Institute of Illegal Images?

Seated around an ash-stained coffee table below a glowing chandelier in Mark McCloud’s dusky parlor on a rainy Saturday morning in October, four friends passed around a joint, trying to define in simple terms the three-story Victorian on 20th Street.

“It’s an archival museum of psychedelic art. Our friend here is the curator,” proffered Arthur Round, an older man cross-legged in a wicker chair. The parlor is plastered with approximately 350 pieces of framed blotter art and guarded from prying eyes by heavy black curtains, making the space feel like a vault or secret subterranean headquarters.

Dubbed the “LSD Museum” by some of his fans, McCloud’s collection includes more than 33,000 sheets and individual tabs of blotter paper imprinted with pop culture images and used to transmit doses of LSD. He calls it the “Institute of Illegal Images.”

Until Nov. 25, dozens of the pieces, as well as some digitally enhanced reprints, are on display at Ever Gold Gallery in the Tenderloin.

McCloud’s mission is to preserve a “skeletal” remnant of San Francisco’s drug-induced 1960s legacy, “so maybe our children can better understand us,” he said. Collectors in the business consider him the bearer of the world’s largest cache of psychedelic blotter art and its foremost historic authority – an institution unto himself.